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" I always, always wanted to be a writer. "
Howard Jacobson
Always
Writer
Wanted
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" I've always said if a woman is looking for a good husband, she should go for a Jewish man past 60. Jewish men are essentially brought up to love women. Then you rebel against that and become a bit of a bastard. Then at 60, you revert. "
Howard Jacobson
Good
Man
Men
" Of my old tendency to overdo the dedication and deface the title page with florid compliments and obscure quotes which the recipient cannot read, I will say only that I learnt my lesson when I had to shell out with my own money for a hardback I'd vandalised and now limit myself to 'Good wishes.' "
Howard Jacobson
Good
Myself
Money
" Imagine the anticlimax of opening a novel you'd just got Dostoyevsky to sign and finding 'Keep smiling - Fyodor.' "
Howard Jacobson
Finding
You
Smiling
" If the academic community gets its way, we will soon all be speaking with a single voice. "
Howard Jacobson
Will
Voice
Single
" Not every anti-Semite is Joseph Goebbels. You can not like Jews much and be no great harm to them. "
Howard Jacobson
You
Harm
Great
" Think of the aged and bed-ridden Matisse cutting out strips of coloured paper, much as a child might, and investing them with a more than mortal vitality... Those strips of paper resonate because they prove that our materials don't determine in advance the worth of what we make. "
Howard Jacobson
Think
Prove
Child
" Again and again, Primo Levi's work is described as indispensable, essential, necessary. None of those terms overstate the case, but they do prepare readers new to Levi for a forbiddingly educative experience, making him a writer unlike all others and the experience of reading him a chore. Which it isn't. "
Howard Jacobson
Reading
New
Experience
" It's a weakness of mine to forget what it is I've just been talking about so that when people make witty allusions to it, I stare at them open-mouthed, not knowing what they're talking about. "
Howard Jacobson
Talking
Weakness
Not Knowing
" Sentimentality works by our seeing only what we want to see. "
Howard Jacobson
Our
Only
Works
" It's a law of our natures, especially when the political fit is on us, to applaud where we already approve, and deride where we don't. "
Howard Jacobson
Fit
Where
Us
" No good writer ever merely cheered us up. But there's an unblinking stare into the darkness of things we have to go elsewhere to find. Jane Austen was made of strong stuff. She was too satiric for D. H. Lawrence's taste and too unforgiving for Kingsley Amis's, but you would still not call her hellish. "
Howard Jacobson
Darkness
She
Good
" As a Jew, I believe that every argument has a counterargument. "
Howard Jacobson
Believe
Argument
Jew
" Every time I criticize the anti-Zionists, they say, 'You are trying to silence us.' I don't deny there are some people who are critical of Israel who are not anti-Semitic. But to criticize Israel, and then criticize Zionism, is not quite the same thing. "
Howard Jacobson
Time
Silence
People
" When emotion rules, every fool thinks that he is holy. "
Howard Jacobson
Emotion
Fool
Thinks
" Not everyone is fortunate enough to earn their living playing. But what draws people to art and artists is a desire to enjoy the propinquity of play. For it is the very freedom of the imagination. And what else were we born to do, but imagine freely? "
Howard Jacobson
Freedom
People
Imagination
" It was reading Hamlet that ruined the concept of authenticity for me, not because Hamlet lacked existentialist credentials himself - indeed, as an earlier discontented Dane, he could be said to have laid the ground for Kierkegaard - but because the line 'to thine own self be true' was spoken by that humourless old ninny, Polonius. "
Howard Jacobson
Reading
True
Be True
" A novel is not a play. A novel takes one reader at a time into its confidence. It can be shockingly personal. Private, even. "
Howard Jacobson
Play
Confidence
Even
" Trump's hobbled vocabulary is now the incontestable stuff of comedy: not just how few his words but how narrow their range, from boastful to irked and back again. For satirists and impressionists, a president who addresses the American people in abbreviated tweetspeak is a gift. "
Howard Jacobson
Comedy
Words
American
" Making America great again, as if to keep the world out. The world and all its fresh ideas and everything that's new and exhilarating and the wind of change that should blow through the world - block it out, wall ourselves up. That for me goes with a small vocabulary. A narrow, confining vocabulary. "
Howard Jacobson
World
Change
Great
" Things go bad after a divorce and often stay that way. It is rare for the parties to return placidly to a time before they met. A bitterness lingers on. Those who call this our Independence Day, fantasising of returning to a never-never time before they married, when they were free, easy, single, and master of their fate, are delusional. "
Howard Jacobson
Time
Fate
Day
" To assert that antisemitism is unlike other racisms is not to claim a privilege for it. Hating a Jew is no worse than hating anyone else. "
Howard Jacobson
Other
Hating
Worse
" Looking back, I realise it wasn't only gym I dreaded at school. Every class was a torment. It wasn't knowledge I objected to but instruction. Why couldn't they just tell us what books to read and leave us to get on and read them? "
Howard Jacobson
Looking Back
Looking
Knowledge
" Does anyone who leaves a Baltic country ever want to return to it? Someone must, I suppose. "
Howard Jacobson
Want
Leaves
Return
" Of the secular mysteries to which I wake with fresh and sometimes angry amazement every day, the queue is the second-most baffling. The first is the fan. "
Howard Jacobson
Fresh
Day
Angry
" What isn't for everybody shouldn't be for anybody: the world's opera houses are the reasons we have cardboard cities. "
Howard Jacobson
Everybody
Houses
Anybody
" It would be nice if we could all agree to this proposition: popularity is not the same as achievement. "
Howard Jacobson
Achievement
Agree
Nice
" I am happiest now. There's nothing like running out of time to make you realise you're in the right skin, with the right person, and that the Apocalypse will happen with or without you. "
Howard Jacobson
Right Person
Time
Skin
" There was no question of ever sending us to Jewish schools... They wanted us out there. They wanted us to be lawyers and doctors. They wanted us out of the religious thing, apart from that ethnic bonding. "
Howard Jacobson
Lawyers
Us
Question
" I've been married three times. I married the girl next door when I was 22, and I wasn't a good husband, but I wasn't a good anything then. Nowadays, I'm much kinder. "
Howard Jacobson
Good
Husband
Next
" I like a singalong. And I'm a bit of a sentimentalist for the past myself. "
Howard Jacobson
Bit
Myself
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